Fifty
years ago the Catholic League was perceived as a deeply suspect and sinister
outfit. Jesuits in disguise plotting the overthrow of the country and its
Established Church by their allegiance to a foreign power. I didn’t know it was
such an exciting organisation when I joined in 1961. Later that same year when
I began my studies for the priesthood at Lichfield Theological College, where a
few years earlier the Principal, Dr Hann, had gone over to Rome I discovered there
had been a Stalinist purge. Students were compelled to resign from the League
or face expulsion. I was strongly advised to do the same.
What
of those holy priests who taught me the Faith? And what of the holy martyrs of
Russia who were being sent to Gulags rather than deny their faith, would they
have resigned from the League? Neither would this arrogant young would-be
martyr. Hurtful as it often was it has to be admitted we did thrive on the
thrill of persecution and enjoyed every minute of it. And behind the idealism
of those Anglo-Catholic priests there was a spirituality of faithful priestly
service, rather than preferment or treading carefully for one’s own advantage. Our
crime was to pray and passionately believe in Christian unity, and the
necessity for all Churches to be in communion with the Bishop of Rome, the
successor of St Peter.
One
lesson we learn about the working of the Holy Spirit is how quickly and
suddenly events can change. From age to age God raises up men and women to be
outstanding witnesses of his love and power. Blessed John Paul II shook the
rotten tree of communism and it all but collapsed. And in 1962, the year after
I went to Lichfield, Blessed John XXIII opened the Second Vatican Council. Suddenly,
everyone was talking about unity with Rome. League members were no longer third
columnists but prophets. Anglican observers rushed to the Council.
From
Lichfield I went to study in Rome before my ordination and saw Archbishop
Ramsey when he visited Pope Paul VI. Who could have predicted, who could have
believed, the transformation that was taking place? ‘We have been like two
quarrelsome sisters’, Pope Paul VI said. And the ARCIC dialogue began. We were
so optimistic that the principal observer at the Vatican Council, Bishop John
Moorman, said unity needed just ‘one step more’. We are now rather less
sanguine, new obstacles have arisen, but we still believe ‘the Lord founded one
church and one church only’[i],
and the League will always witness to that. We shall never give up. ‘How is it
possible to remain divided, if we have been ‘buried’ through Baptism in the
Lord’s death’ appealed Blessed John Paul in an encyclical which took the
League’s motto as its title, UT UNUM SINT.
There
have been disappointments before, human efforts ending in failure. Some of you
have seen, in St. Peter’s Rome, Bernini’s spectacular tribute to Pope Alexander
VII, near the top of the left aisle? Deep in prayer, the Pope floats on
flamboyant drapery of porphyry, while the allegorical figures of Justice,
Prudence, Charity and Truth skip around him, as they did during his life.
Charity cradles a child, and Truth – if you have seen the monument have you
noticed what Truth is doing? – her left foot stands on a globe of the world.
She is stamping on England.
What crime had England
committed to be immortalised in marble? The Church of England had rejected
thirty years of dialogue initiated by Archbishop Laud of Canterbury supported
by the Bishop of Chichester. The plan was to end the schism between the
Catholic Church and the Church of England by a scheme that would have allowed the
Church of England to keep an English Liturgy, married priests and other
patrimony. Familiar? The seeds of the Ordinariate were sown three centuries ago.
When the League was founded
in 1913 it was heir to much prayer and belief that God wills all his followers
to be united in the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church, which Jesus
built on St Peter. Prayer and belief that intensified during the nineteenth
century as an effect of the Oxford Movement. And now, at our Centenary, we can
give thanks for the triumph of love over fear, and dwell on that. For, although
we are hugely disappointed that ARCIC’s vision of full organic unity has not
yet been fulfilled, the foundation of
the Ordinariates, as the Archbishops of Canterbury and Westminster both
acknowledged, would not have been possible without the ARCIC dialogues of the
past forty years. It is, as they both declared, a ‘consequence of ecumenical
dialogue between the Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion’[ii].
It seemed at first as
though the ordination of women had ended the ARCIC dialogue. I suggested to Cardinal
Hume when I met him at Walsingham, that Pope John Paul II must have been
disappointed when the Church of England’s decided to ordain women. ‘He was
angry’, the Cardinal told me. The Catholic Church had invested great hopes and
expectations in the Catholic-Anglican dialogue.
Cardinal Kasper famously declared
that the ordination of women bishops will lead not only to a short-lived cold,
but to a serious and long-lasting chill. But this is proving to be very far
from the case. The work of the Holy Spirit goes on. Unity is an imperative part
of the prayer of Christ for his people.
So, where do we go from here? Can the Catholic
League be prophetic again? Vatican II, in the Constitution of the Church, spoke of the Holy Spirit ‘bestowing
upon her varied hierarchic and charismatic gifts’.[iii] Many
homilies this last weekend have been preached suggesting that Peter, the rock
and leader, represents the hierarchic gifts of the Church, and Paul, its
outstanding preacher, the charismatic. The ARCIC discussions have dealt almost
exclusively with the hierarchic gifts, with doctrine, ministry, sacraments, the
Petrine ministry, authority. And remarkable agreement and consensus has been
achieved as a permanent legacy. The Catholic League has played her honourable
part in promoting and explaining ARCIC’s Agreed Statements.
But the Council spoke of
‘charismatic’ gifts as well as ‘hierarchic’. It put new emphasis on the
Priesthood of the Faithful. And since the Council we have witnessed the
formation and flourishing of new ecclesial movements, over 200 of them in the
Catholic Church, and some in the Anglican Church too. Preaching to 280,000
members, gathered in St Peter’s Square on Pentecost 2000, Pope John Paul II
said, ‘The movements and new communities, providential expressions of the new
springtime brought forth by the Spirit with the Second Vatican Council, announce
the power of God’s love which in overcoming divisions and barriers of every
kind, renews the face of the earth to build the civilization of love’. They are
at the heart of the new evangelisation. I think the future growing into unity
between our Churches will increasingly focus on the charismatic gifts,
‘overcoming divisions and barriers of every kind’.
Now, following all these
new movements we even have an ‘evangelical pope’, a pope who shows that you can
be both catholic and evangelical, a good friend of fellow-Argentinian Luis
Palau, the successor to Billy Graham, who relates, ‘Whenever we pray together
he says “lay your hands on me and pray for me, that God will keep me as
servant”… He’s really centred on Jesus and the Gospel, the pure Gospel’. At his
Wednesday audience a fortnight ago Francis told the crowd that he had spent 40
minutes that morning praying with an evangelical pastor. Pope Francis has spoken of preaching the Gospel of grace, warning that
‘when we leave grace a little to one side in our proclamation, the Gospel is
not effective... Evangelical preaching flows from gratuitousness, from the wonder
of the salvation that comes; and that which I have freely received I must
freely give’.
In recent years Anglican
evangelicals have become notably less hostile to the Catholic Church, which
once they regarded as the scarlet woman.
Father Raniero Cantalamessa, the Papal preacher, is a welcome preacher
at Holy Trinity Brompton, and Cardinal Koch, the new president of the
Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, spent time there. Nicky
Gumbel went to the Synod of New Evangelisation in Rome last year at which
Archbishop Rowan Williams was invited to speak, and Alpha is spreading widely
in the Catholic Church. Archbishop Welby and his wife are deeply involved with
the new Catholic Movements, and spent a weekend before his enthronement with
the Chemin Neuf Community in Switzerland. And when he met the Pope Francis they
spent time praying and speaking of what God had done in their lives.
This is a new dialogue, a
new ecumenical development, typical of the way in which the Holy Spirit
surprises us. Pope John Paul II went so far as to say, ‘certain features of the
Christian mystery have at times been more effectively emphasized’[iv]
by those with whom we are not yet in union. There has never really been a
spiritual dialogue between Anglican Evangelicals and Anglican Catholics, but
now the opportunity is arising. A
spiritual dialogue, a dialogue of prayer; for the deepening the spiritual life
is one of the objects of the League. And Jesus showed us in his prayer to the
Father that prayer, not human effort, is the way to unity, and prayer for unity
has always been at the heart of the League. The new movements in the Catholic
Church illuminate this way and give us confidence, and my hope is that just as
the Catholic League has for a century pioneered and continues to lead the Anglican Church into a deeper
understanding of the hierarchic nature of the Church, and the necessity of
unity with the See of Peter, so it will now help the Church to grow into an
ever-deepening appreciation of the charismatic gifts the Holy Spirit bestows
upon us all, ‘building bridges from all sides towards reconciliation through
the Catholic faith’[v]
Michael Rear, President
Catholic Church of the Assumption & St Gregory, Warwick Street, LONDON
July 2nd, 2013
[ii] Joint Statement by the Archbishop of
Westminster and the Archbishop of Canterbury, 20 October 2009.
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